7 Key Approaches to Achieve Cloud Cost Visibility

What is Cloud Cloud Visibility?

Cloud cost visibility is the process of tracking, analyzing, and understanding the expenses associated with cloud services, including applications, resources, and infrastructure. It provides organizations with a clear view of how their cloud resources are utilized and how much they are spending. This visibility is essential for making informed decisions about optimizing cloud costs.

Cloud cost visibility is not just about having access to the data but also about organizing and presenting it in a way that makes it easy to understand and act upon - in the form of dashboards, graphs or any other representation. Well-structured and well-analyzed data enables businesses to gain insights into cloud usage patterns, identify inefficiencies, and take corrective actions. With accurate visibility, organizations can forecast future cloud costs and allocate resources more efficiently, ensuring they are not overspending or underutilizing their cloud environment.

Why is Cloud Cost Visibility Important?

• Cost Optimization: With enhanced cloud cost visibility, organizations can identify opportunities to reduce excess spending. Organizations can track and analyze spending across the company, connect cloud costs to business value, and identify the areas where resources are being underutilized or whether the needs are met. This leads to a better allocation of cloud resources and a reduction in unnecessary expenses.
• Resource Optimization: Understanding how cloud resources are consumed is important for making informed decisions to achieve cloud cost optimization. Cloud cost visibility helps organizations monitor who uses what resources and how efficiently they are managed.
• Budget Planning: Accurate visibility into cloud costs helps organizations forecast and plan their budgets more effectively. It helps them prepare in a better manner. By analyzing current and future workloads, tracking usage trends, and accounting for unexpected expenses, businesses can create more reliable budget plans. Also, with cloud cost visibility, organizations can gain valuable insights into how different parts of the business utilize cloud resources, allowing them to optimize spending and maximize return on investment (ROI).

7 Key Approaches to Achieve Cloud Cost Visibility

1. Build a FinOps Team

The first step is understanding that cloud cost visibility is a group effort. Building a FinOps team with members from development, operations, engineering, and finance ensures that everyone understands what visibility is and how it works or what results it will yield. This collaboration helps in aligning cloud cost management practices with business objectives. Identify all the people who are involved in this process and are decision-makers and understand how they can work together to get the most out of the cloud spend.

2.  Establish the Foundation with Data

Data is the backbone of cloud cost visibility. To ensure the data you have gives the most accurate insights, you need to make sure that the data is accumulated from all the cloud service providers, is accurate and latest, and is granular enough to derive conclusions and patterns. Storing huge amounts of data can be a challenge though, but it is very important for historical data, comparisons and when setting budgets for the future. 

3. Leverage Dashboards and Granular Reports

Granular data helps create detailed reports which in turn allows you to monitor which cloud resources are consuming the most budget, how Reserved Instances are utilized, and helps you to track trends over time. You can have a huge bunch of data but converting them into dashboards and reports are critical for visualizing cloud cost data and extracting actionable insights. The key idea is simple - data must be arranged in a way that’s easy to interpret and act on. 

4. Create a Tagging Strategy

Tags act as labels that tie cloud resources to specific departments, projects, or teams. A well-defined tagging strategy involves consistently labeling all resources so that no cloud spend is untracked or misallocated. Manual tagging might become very cumbersome but automating the tagging process can alleviate the burden on development teams. An effective tagging strategy makes it easier to forecast, budget, and identify cost-saving opportunities.

5. Implement Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection, driven by AI and machine learning, allows you to stay on top of unexpected cloud usage spikes even when you’re not actively monitoring your reports. Anomaly detection tools help detect instances of abnormally high costs and promptly notify users of these occurrences. You can use tools like Harness CCM to detect cost anomalies for your Kubernetes clusters and cloud accounts. CCM cost anomalies compare the previous cloud cost spending with the current spending to detect cost anomalies. Harness CCM uses statistical anomaly detection techniques and forecasting at scale to determine cost anomalies. These methods can detect various types of anomalies, such as a one-time cost spike, and gradual, or consistent cost increases.

6. Use Budgeting and Forecasting Tools

Effective budgeting and forecasting are key to achieving full cloud cost visibility. A robust cloud cost management system should allow you to track past, present, and future spending. AI-powered tools can help predict future cloud costs based on past usage trends, enabling more accurate financial planning. Budget alerts, proactive notifications, and tailored forecasts ensure that every team has the visibility needed to manage cloud costs efficiently.

7. Use Tools Like Harness CCM

At Harness, we leverage the power of AI and machine learning to streamline cloud cost management. Harness Cloud Cost Management (CCM) provides comprehensive tracking of cloud spending, enabling optimized expenditure.
From CCM Dahboards that help you visualize cloud cost data across clusters and cloud accounts Anomaly Detection that detects instances of abnormally high costs and promptly notify users of these occurrences, Harness ensures everything is automatically managed, allowing you to focus on your core business while significantly reducing costs.

Learn more about Cloud Cost Management by Harness, or book a demo today.

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